Hyderabad: When asked why he referred to Muslims as “those who have more children” and “infiltrators” in a recent speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that people were misinterpreting his remarks as referring to Muslims.
“I am surprised, who has told you that when [it comes to the issue of having more children] … you add a reference to Muslims? Why are you doing this injustice to Muslims?”, he said in an interview to News18.
Modi added to say that “whichever community it comes to, wherever there is poverty, there are more children there”. He then said he did not specifically mention either Hindus or Muslims and that if he started producing Hindu-Muslim rhetoric, he would “no longer be fit to stay in public life”.
The conversation was about a speech he gave while campaigning in Rajasthan’s Banswara on April 21.
His party has put up official videos that demonise Muslims and show them to be a part of a conspiracy by the Congress to take away reservations from deprived Hindu communities and direct it towards Muslims.
The Election Commission ordered one such video to be taken down.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
What Modi said
Modi in Banswara had said – falsely – that the Congress had promised to survey people’s property and follow up this exercise by distributing “our sisters’ gold” to others, implying that the mangalsutras worn by Hindu women would also be distributed.
“When they were in government earlier, they had said that Muslims had the first right to the nation’s property. This means they will collect this property and distribute it to whom? To those who have more children. To infiltrators,” Modi said during his speech, contrary to what he claimed during his News18 interview. [Emphasis added]
He was referring to remarks made by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 on minority empowerment, though Singh did not say Muslims had the first right to India’s resources.
Seemingly undeterred, Modi repeated his remarks at another election campaign and said he had only “put the truth before the country”.
Starting from 2002, when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, Modi has a track-record of using Islamophobic language that dehumanises Muslims.
Campaigning for the assembly elections after the riots, he referred to the relief camps housing Muslims as “children-producing factories”. He also demonised Muslims by referring to them as polygamous: “We are 5 and ours 25! (Ame panch, amaara panchees).”
Even before that, as BJP general secretary, Modi went on TV in 2001 and castigated Islam and Muslim leaders for harbouring plans about religious domination.
So why backtrack now?
1. Modi’s openly pointed and communal remarks hurt the Vishwaguru pitch as they were widely criticised by the domestic press, but more worryingly for Modi, also by global media.
The New York Times said as much: it noted that Modi’s language targeting Muslims contrasted the image he has cultivated and presented on the world stage – as the leader of a vishwaguru or ‘teacher to the world’.
The concern that an Islamophobic trope – about Muslims having more children – needed backing may well have been a reason why almost two weeks later, the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister released a ‘working paper’ pointing to the fact that Hindus’ share of the Indian population fell 7.8% (and by 6.6 percentage points) between 1950 and 2015, while that of Muslims increased by 43% (and by 4.25 percentage points).
Analysts have pointed out that this is no novel finding and that only the spin is new. Population stabilisation in India today follows trends that successive censuses have already recorded. The Modi government has been unable to conduct the one due in 2021, in a break for the first time in India’s 150 year record.
That Muslims “have more children” and will eat up the share due to other communities was an idea the BJP faithfully endorsed in a hateful video released on X (formerly Twitter).
But what drove Modi to make the remarks in the first place, given that – as the New York Times put it – he “normally lets others do the dirtiest work of polarising Hindus against Muslims”, and that among his core, hardline support base, his credentials as an anti-Muslim leader bore no repeating?
2. Some have suggested that the backtracking may have been also because the remarks backfired and turned some voters against the BJP.
There is no evidence to conclude this just yet, but increasing the intensity of the anger of a significant section of the population suddenly may increase the intensity of opposition and cause electoral damage.
3. The 2002 Gujarat stain on Modi’s reputation, due to which he was denied a visa to travel to the US and the UK, was washed off with painstaking efforts to recast him as a ‘development’ man, starting with the Vibrant Gujarat shows and finally with being elected to India’s highest office, at the back of a ‘Gujarat Model’ campaign and the ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’ slogan.
It has not been necessary to signal to the core Hindutva base that he was the same man as in 2002, except at times like in 2017, when the mask slipped during the Gujarat assembly election campaign.
With the most recent set of statements, the crack in this new statesman image, with a potentially lesser parliamentary majority, could hamper the odds of his going down as a great Indian leader, towards which the cult has been continuously driven.
4. The Election Commission has been under tremendous pressure from opposition parties, civil society groups and common citizens to take action against Modi for his hateful speeches against Indian Muslims. Some people have even filed a petition in the Supreme Court demanding action against him.
By providing this excuse and backtracking from the anti-Muslim thrust of his speeches, Modi could be making a case that will stand the scrutiny of the courts.
Modi’s bid to make false claims and then try and deny that he directly named Muslims, not in one speech but repeatedly, could have been driven by a motley combination of these factors.
However, there is enough evidence to show that he indeed named Muslims, and his lie should not prevent the Election Commission or the Supreme Court from taking strict legal and criminal action against Modi.